Keeping track of the ongoing impeachment process in the U.S. House of Representatives requires that we process constant references to a whistleblower complaint, subpoenas, witness statements and testimony, and committee procedural rules. A tremendous resource for reviewing these documents is the U.S. Presidential Impeachment Library, available to members of the Northwestern University community at http://turing.library.northwestern.edu/login?url=https://heinonline.org/HOL/Index?collection=presidentsimp.
HeinOnline’s U.S. Presidential Impeachment Library
The landing page for this database provides links to impeachment materials categorized by President, as well as a brief, but informative, history of presidential impeachment in the United States. Upon clicking the link for “Donald Trump,” we arrive at a page with links to a pair of resources. The first, “Impeachment Process in the House of Representatives (R45769),” is a digestible, 17-page report published on October 10, 2019 by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. The second, “Whistleblower Complaint on Ukraine,” leads to an extensive collection of documents, listed in reverse chronological order, related to the ongoing impeachment investigation. These documents are available either as downloadable PDFs or via external links to congressional websites. In addition to browsing the list for a particular document, it’s also possible, using the “Search this title” box, to locate document containing particular phrases or terms.
In addition to serving as a useful resource for understanding the ongoing impeachment investigation of President Trump, the U.S. Presidential Impeachment Library is also a superb tool for learning about previous presidential impeachments, as well as the process, more generally. Indeed, the collections relating to Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton each contain troves of primary documents. Moreover, the “Scholarly Articles” tab offers a vast collection of law review articles dealing with the topics of impeachment and presidential power. Usefully, this collection is both searchable and sortable by date or number of citations.
If you’re interested in locating primary documents relating to the current or past presidential impeachments, or if you’re hoping to take a step back and review scholarly discussions of the topic, we recommend taking a look at this excellent resource.
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